I think that businesses have an ethical responsibility to their employees. This means that a business needs to ensure that its employees are safe and healthy. The business needs to pay them enough and provide health care. A business with healthy, safe and happy employees is going to have more productive employees too.

One question I am particularly interested in is the ethical responsibility of a business in regards to the environment.

For instance, is a restaurant obligated, ethically, to recycle the boxes in which it receives shipments of products? Is it ok for a business to throw those boxes in the trash?

The boxes here stand as a symbolic example for many small decisions that business operators have to make every day. The question, I believe, really is trying to get at whether or not a high volume producer of waste is beholden to the same moral constraints as an individual when it comes to ecological practices.

Far larger questions along these lines come to mind when we think back to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico...